Muhammad Ali was the first Black Muslim American I heard of. Before his name entered my immature consciousness, I did not know Americans could be Black or Muslim. (This revelation came to me during a classroom trivia quiz; ‘Muhammad Ali’ was the answer to the question ‘Who is the world heavyweight champion?’) It is hardContinue reading “RIP Muhammad Ali: Once And Always, The Greatest”
Category Archives: Books
The ‘Ideal Marriage’ And Its Painful Sexual Ignorance
In Making Love: An Erotic Odyssey (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1992, pp. 32-33), Richard Rhodes writes: Somehow I acquired a copy of Dutch physician T. H. van de Velde‘s Ideal Marriage, published in the United States in 1926, the most popular marriage manual in American until The Joy of Sex came along. Ideal MarriageContinue reading “The ‘Ideal Marriage’ And Its Painful Sexual Ignorance”
Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Mountains Of The Mind
A few years ago, while visiting my brother in India, I browsed through his collection of mountaineering books (some of them purchased by me in the US and sent over to him.) In Robert MacFarlane‘s Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit, I found the following epigraph: O the mind, mind has mountains –Continue reading “Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Mountains Of The Mind”
Robespierre On The Iraq War
In 1792, Revolutionary France debated, and prepared for, war. It was surrounded by monarchies who cared little for this upstart viper in the nest; and conversely, a sworn “enemy of the ancien regime” could not but both despise and fear what lay just beyond its borders: precisely the same entity in kind as was being combatedContinue reading “Robespierre On The Iraq War”
The Acknowledgments Section As Venue For Disgruntlement
In The Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre (University of Chicago Press, 1985) David P. Jordan writes in the ‘Acknowledgments’ section: With the exception of the Humanities Institute of the University of Illinois at Chicago, whose fellowship gave me the leisure to rethink and rewrite, no fund or foundation, agency or institution, whether public or privateContinue reading “The Acknowledgments Section As Venue For Disgruntlement”
Chelsea Manning’s Bad Luck With The American Polity
In The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story Behind The Wikileaks Whistleblower(Verso Press, New York, 2013) Chase Madar writes: If any lesson can be drawn from the Manning affair, it’s that leaks can make a great difference if there is organized political muscle to put them to good use. Information on its own is futile; as uselessContinue reading “Chelsea Manning’s Bad Luck With The American Polity”
Mass Incarceration And The ‘Overfederalization’ Of Crime
America’s mass incarceration is the bastard child of many. Among them: racism, the War on Drugs (itself a racist business), the evisceration of the Constitution through ideological interpretive strategies, prosecutorial misconduct, police brutality, and so on. Yet other culprits may be found elsewhere, in other precincts of the legal and political infrastructure of the nation.Continue reading “Mass Incarceration And The ‘Overfederalization’ Of Crime”
Fascism In American Iconography
As the United States of America prepares for the eventuality that on 20th January 2017, John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, could swear in an orange-haired fascist with a tiny penis as the US’ next President, it is worth reminding ourselves that the aforesaid toupeed individual would take the reigns ofContinue reading “Fascism In American Iconography”
Kōbō Abe’s ‘Woman in The Dunes’ And The Scientist’s Existentialist Despair
Kōbō Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes wears and displays its existentialist, absurdist aspirations openly and transparently; this is its terse Wikipedia summation: In 1955, Jumpei Niki, a schoolteacher from Tokyo, visits a fishing village to collect insects. After missing the last bus, he is led, by the villagers, in an act of apparent hospitality, to a houseContinue reading “Kōbō Abe’s ‘Woman in The Dunes’ And The Scientist’s Existentialist Despair”
Hume’s Atheism And God As Nature
The ‘freethinker’ Anthony Collins is said to have commented on Samuel Clarke‘s Boyle Lectures on the existence of God that “it had never occurred to anyone to doubt the existence of God until Clarke tried so hard to prove it.” (noted in John Clayton’s Reason, Religion, and Gods: Essays in Cross Cultural Philosophy of Religion,Continue reading “Hume’s Atheism And God As Nature”
Samir Chopra 